Former WWE Intercontinental Champion/Olympic Strongman Ken Patera recently joined in for an interview with WrestlingNews. Back in 1984, after an incident at McDonald’s, a fight broke out that saw 10 cops beaten and Ken Patera was sent to prison.
On April 6, 1984, at around midnight, Ken Patera went to eat at a McDonald’s in Waukesha, Wisconsin, after wrestling earlier that evening. Patera was informed that the restaurant was closed and denied service. The former Olympic weightlifter was upset and threw a thirty-pound boulder threw the store’s front window before leaving the premises.
When police arrived at his hotel room for questioning, Patera’s roommate and fellow wrestler, Masa Saito, greeted them at the door. As officers demanded to search the room, Patera emerged, and a fight broke out.
According to newspapers, a female officer, nineteen at the time, sustained numerous injuries, including broken teeth, a concussion, and a ruptured appendix. Her partner, a male officer, suffered a broken leg. It took thirteen police officers to arrest Saito and Patera. They were later found guilty of battery and other crimes and sentenced to two years in jail.
During the interview, Ken Patera talked about former WWE CEO Vince McMahon paying him while in prison for beating up 16 cops. Here is what he said:
“Vince was sending my wife money every month. I went from making 35 – 40,000 a month to nothing. So now she’s cut off. I talked to him from prison and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Ken. I’ll take care of her and the kids’, so he had his accountant send her a check every month. I don’t even remember how much it was. It added up though. When I got out of prison a year and a half later, he called me and said, ‘Ken, we don’t have a place for what I want to do with you. We don’t have a place right now.’ I got out in December. ‘Can you wait until April’, I believe it was, and I said, ‘Yeah. No problem. You know when the time’s right.'”
“So we got everything and he flew me back there to Connecticut to his new mansion. We had a nice talk in the kitchen. Linda was there and the kids were upstairs. They were little then. I don’t know how old Shane was. God I don’t remember. Stephanie was even younger, maybe six, seven years old. So Vince takes me on the house tour. It was a fu**ing huge house, indoor swimming pool and he had a big gym. It was a beautiful place, and that was before he was a billionaire. I had a nice chat with Vince and I started back in April, May, something like that, whenever it happened.”
